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David Oclander's West Point-bound student, Dennis Martir (left), hopes to follow in his teacher's footsteps.

Veteran David Oclander’s ser­vice didn’t end when he left the front lines. The former colonel is a high school English teacher in a city where homicides outnumber U.S. troop killings in Afghanistan. In this excerpt from the new book For Love of Country, Oclander inspires his students to dream big—and for one of them, that means following in the soldier’s footsteps.

David Oclander bounded through a Roman-columned entranceway and into the oldest public education building in Chicago, now home to a college-prep charter school. At 9:30 in the morning, he stood outside his classroom, greeting his 34 pupils. Ahead was one final sophomore English lesson—and then summer. This class was a chance for the students to celebrate completing another year of school in a city where the dropout rate averages 40 percent, and a chance for Mr. O to celebrate completing his second year of teaching.

Oclander looked each kid in the eye as he or she passed.

“Hey, great essay.”

Another student got a fist bump.

“Much improvement.”

Two-thirds of the class were Hispanic, the rest African-American. They hailed from Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods, where drugs were hawked on the corners and gunfire was heard nightly. They hoped this aging West Side building would be their ticket out. The school, Chicago Bulls College Prep, had been endowed by the charitable arm of the city’s eponymous professional basketball team. And so the kids trekked here every morning, some traveling as much as an hour on buses and trains.

The previous week, Oclander had invited an Ethiopian refugee to share with the class his remarkable journey to the ivy-strewn campus of Harvard. Of all the advice the young man imparted, Oclander asked his students, “What was the most meaningful for you?”

“Don’t study what you know,” one boy said.

Oclander followed up with a reference to a popular exercise program. “Who loves doing CrossFit?”

Hands shot up.

“Not all of you like the same exercises. Some of you prefer to run. Some of you like to lift weights.” He quoted one of the founders of CrossFit: “He’d tell you, ‘Those things you don’t like to do—go straight at them.’ ”

Then he passed out the results of a recent standardized test.

“Felipe, you’re on the way. It’s clear you’re putting in the effort,” he said to one young man.

A girl named Kayla said that she was thinking of dropping out. Oclander walked over and squatted next to her.

“I’ve failed so many times I’ve stopped counting,” he said. “Failing doesn’t define you. If you define yourself by a snapshot in time, you are shortchanging yourself. You’re all going to college. You all have the potential.”

Four years earlier, Oclander had delivered a similar rah-rah talk to soldiers in the badlands of Afghanistan, where he commanded a battalion task force of a thousand paratroopers. They were heading to the outskirts of Kandahar, the second-largest city in the country, where they would be building and manning checkpoints on every road heading into the urban center. It was a dangerous assignment that would leave them exposed to Taliban attacks, but it was an important component of a new U.S. strategy to beat back the insurgency. Keeping his troops focused and confident, and pushing them to learn and stay fit, improved their odds of returning home alive.

An Indiana-raised son of an Argentine immigrant, Oclander had spent his adult life defending his nation. Though he was a talented soccer player, he turned aside recruiting pitches from several universities to enroll in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He spent most of the next two decades in the 82nd Airborne Division, rising through the officer ranks. He deployed twice to Iraq and once to ­Afghanistan. When he returned, he took an assignment planning future military missions on the Pentagon’s Joint Staff.

Oclander’s desk in the basement of the Pentagon had three computers. Two were connected to an internal Defense Department network. The other he used to keep abreast of world news. One day in August 2011 a headline from Chicago caught his eye: “Boy, 13, Dead from Gunshot on Basketball Court.” A week later, he read a story about another child in Chicago who had also been shot to death.

Oclander began to track homicides in Chicago. He compared the tallies of attacks on U.S. troops in Afghanistan that he received through his classified computer to the violent deaths in America’s third-largest city. “Chicago Homicides Outnumber U.S. Troop Killings in Afghanistan.”

The greatest threat to our country is no longer overseas, it’s within our borders, he thought to himself.

He wondered what he, a career soldier, could do. With his leadership skills, his commitment to fitness, and his experience in mentoring young soldiers, he thought he had a special set of skills for working in a classroom.

Oclander sent out his résumé to some of the country’s largest charter school networks and public school systems. Your background is great, he was told, but do you have a teaching credential? Do you have classroom experience? When he said no, the universal response was thanks, but no thanks.

Unwilling to give up, Oclander tapped West Point’s alumni network and connected with a fellow graduate in Chicago who ran a mentoring program. From him, Oclander learned that Illinois allows charter schools to hire teachers without credentials. The man urged Oclander to contact the Noble Network of Charter Schools. When Oclander got in touch with Noble’s chief ­executive, Michael Milkie, he was invited for an interview.

Three months later, Oclander was teaching a course on leadership at a Noble school on Chicago’s crime-ridden West Side. It didn’t take long for students to learn that Mr. O wasn’t like their other teachers. Junior Dennis Martir decided to show up the old soldier. Martir, a Puerto Rican who lacked a ripple of fat on his muscled frame, challenged Oclander to a push-up contest. The competitor in Oclander couldn’t resist.

Students around them counted. Martir pumped out forty. Oclander hit sixty.

A few days later, Oclander pulled Martir aside to ask whether he had ever thought about applying to a service academy. Martir said he was thinking of enlisting in the army to become a rank-and-file soldier, if he couldn’t land a college scholarship.

Oclander explained that the academies provide a four-year college education for free, but they do require a five-year commitment to the armed forces upon graduation. “It sounds like the perfect combination for you,” he said, urging Martir to apply for a weeklong summer program at West Point.

Martir went, and loved it. “We bonded with each other within the week,” he said of he and his fellow aspiring cadets. They came from across the nation, across the class spectrum, across racial lines. But few others had navigated a path as remarkable as Martir’s. In ­Chicago, Martir’s house was located on the fault line between two ­rival gangs, the Cobras and the Eagles. When he was 9, he watched through his bedroom window as one man shot another on the street below. The gunman spotted young Dennis—a potential witness—and shot at him. The bullet missed his head by inches.

From that day on, his mother, Yolanda, kept him at home when he wasn’t at school. There would be no playing basketball on the neighborhood courts or biking through the streets for him, and no goofing off at home, either. After watching him attend eight grades of Chicago public schools without being assigned enough work to require his carrying a book bag, Martir’s stepfather enrolled him in a Noble charter.

When Martir began his senior year in 2013, Oclander helped him navigate West Point’s application process, which requires candidates to be nominated by a member of Congress. Martir’s test scores were on the bubble for an academy, but the young man figured that even if he didn’t make it, his stepfather would be proud of his perseverance.

That January, Martir’s stepfather was killed in a car accident. Two days later, Martir received word that he had been admitted to the academy.

In March, Oclander took Dennis and Yolanda to an annual celebration of West Point’s founding, hosted by Chicago-area alumni at a posh country club in the suburbs. As they chatted at the event, she told Oclander that Dennis’s biological father had been one of the city’s biggest drug dealers and that he had been in prison for much of Dennis’s youth.

Learning about Martir’s father confirmed for Oclander that West Point was the right school for Dennis. The kid was a fighter and a survivor. He had his own moral compass. And his life experience in urban Chicago would bring a fresh perspective to a ­tradition-bound institution dominated for years by white men raised in rural America. “He knows more about overcoming obstacles than most other kids his age,” Oclander said.

Martir had picked up some of that skill on the streets and at home. But it was Oclander, he said, who taught him more than anyone else how to smash through barriers to achieve a goal that he hadn’t even known ­existed 20 months earlier.

“He has made the impossible possible for me,” Martir said a few days before his high school graduation.

As the two lunched at a ­Brazilian restaurant, Martir told Oclander he was inspired by his career in uniform as much as he was by what Oclander had to say. He looked over at Oclander and said, “When I’m done with being a soldier, I want to be like you. I want to find a way to keep ­serving my country.”

A message from For Love of Country author and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

The post-9/11 years have brought us the longest period of sustained warfare in our nation’s history. We have met this unprecedented challenge with a small cadre of citizens who charged forth to serve so that the rest of us could go on with life as usual. We have asked so much of them—and of their families. The multiple, yearlong deployments that many uncomplainingly fulfilled often amounted to more time on the battlefield than their parents faced in Vietnam or their grandparents confronted in the Second World War. They missed birthdays and graduations, dance recitals and Little League games. Many spent their tours in Iraq and Afghanistan under the constant threat of getting blown up.

For too long, too many of us have paid scant attention to the sacrifice of a brave few in our midst. It is unhealthy for a nation to become detached from those who secure it.

As the war in Afghanistan winds down, it is tempting to see this as a moot issue. It is not. Our nation will continue to send men and women into harm’s way for years to come, albeit in smaller tranches, as extremists bent on attacking the United States and our citizens abroad find safe haven in lawless parts of the Middle East and Africa. But the next phase of our wars is shifting to the home front. More than 1.5 million post-9/11 veterans have already ­taken off their uniforms and entered the civilian world. Another million will be following them in the next few years, as enlistments end and budget cuts shrink our military. They deserve to enter a society that welcomes them with an appreciation and understanding of their sacrifice.

“In response, in March 2014, Sheri and I and our Schultz Family Foundation launched Onward Veterans as a national initiative to empower veterans and their families in making a successful transition to civilian life.”

If you are an employer, give veterans a fair shake. They don’t want your pity or a handout. What they deserve, however, is genuine understanding and appreciation of the skills they’ve gleaned. Serving in the military qualifies one to be more than a security guard. Veterans come with a can-do spirit. Many possess leadership and decision-making experience that exceed that of ­civilians two decades their senior. They know how to follow orders but also how to exercise initiative. Hiring veterans isn’t charity—it’s good business.

If you are a veteran, don’t underestimate yourself, and don’t give up when you encounter obstacles along the way. As many of you know—and others soon will discover—the transition into civilian life isn’t easy. Avail yourself of the post-9/11 G.I. Bill benefits, the most generous federal education support for veterans in our nation’s history. And follow the example of Kyle White—not what he did on the hills of eastern Afghanistan, but after he got out of the army: Instead of using his G.I. Bill to take easy classes in college, he challenged himself by taking math courses so he could graduate with a degree in finance. Now he has a good-paying job as an investment analyst. “I couldn’t rest on what I did out there on the mountain,” he said. “We veterans have been given great opportunities—we just have to seize them.”

AMG/Parade Digital

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